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September 12, 2009

Lit Drift

Check out Lit Drift, the new blog, resource, and community dedicated to the art & craft of fiction in the 21st century. Featuring daily creative prompts, short stories, and a weekly FREE book giveaway called Free Book Friday. Here's one post that caught my eye:

With 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even Star Trek,
the notion of transformative work has been a particularly hot topic
these past few months. Transformative work not only plays havoc with
intellectual property law, but also with the audience as storytellers
take our familiar, beloved characters and then subvert them entirely.
Holden Caulfield is 76 years old and on the run from a nursing home,
Elizabeth Bennett defends her family from hoards of zombies, and James
Tiberius Kirk finds himself without a father and a long way to go
before he can become captain of the USS Enterprise. The result is all
the more shocking and enlightening given the juxtaposition of the
transformed work with our knowledge of the original work.

It’s a compelling artistic endeavor. And transformative work is nothing new. Fans of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad wrote their own books based on his works. Cervantes’ Don Quixote saw more than a few unauthorized published sequels. John Gardner’s Grendel,
a re-telling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, was published
to great acclaim (which, being one of my favorite books, I definitely
recommend you giving it a read). Gregory Maguire’s best-selling Wicked, an alternate take on The Wizard of Oz, is now one of Broadway’s biggest hits. You get the idea.

But what about fan-made transformative works? While there are
countless pieces of fan fiction and fan art out there, in which fans
take their favorite characters and merely continue their stories,
genuine transformative works are far less common. But as few and
far-between as they may be, their stories really resonate.

After the jump, a short list of lesser-known, but by no means
lesser-quality, fan-made transformative storytelling that challenge the
old adage “there are no new stories.”

Comments

Lit Drift

Check out Lit Drift, the new blog, resource, and community dedicated to the art & craft of fiction in the 21st century. Featuring daily creative prompts, short stories, and a weekly FREE book giveaway called Free Book Friday. Here's one post that caught my eye:

With 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even Star Trek,
the notion of transformative work has been a particularly hot topic
these past few months. Transformative work not only plays havoc with
intellectual property law, but also with the audience as storytellers
take our familiar, beloved characters and then subvert them entirely.
Holden Caulfield is 76 years old and on the run from a nursing home,
Elizabeth Bennett defends her family from hoards of zombies, and James
Tiberius Kirk finds himself without a father and a long way to go
before he can become captain of the USS Enterprise. The result is all
the more shocking and enlightening given the juxtaposition of the
transformed work with our knowledge of the original work.

It’s a compelling artistic endeavor. And transformative work is nothing new. Fans of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad wrote their own books based on his works. Cervantes’ Don Quixote saw more than a few unauthorized published sequels. John Gardner’s Grendel,
a re-telling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, was published
to great acclaim (which, being one of my favorite books, I definitely
recommend you giving it a read). Gregory Maguire’s best-selling Wicked, an alternate take on The Wizard of Oz, is now one of Broadway’s biggest hits. You get the idea.

But what about fan-made transformative works? While there are
countless pieces of fan fiction and fan art out there, in which fans
take their favorite characters and merely continue their stories,
genuine transformative works are far less common. But as few and
far-between as they may be, their stories really resonate.

After the jump, a short list of lesser-known, but by no means
lesser-quality, fan-made transformative storytelling that challenge the
old adage “there are no new stories.”